NASA celebrates this year's 50th anniversary with the creation of an educational card game, "You've Been Sentenced! - NASA 50th Anniversary Special Edition." NASA and McNeill Designs for Brighter Minds formed a partnership in April of 2008 to create the game, which bears a few similarities to Scrabble.

NASA and McNeill Designs collaborated to create the Add-on Deck which will present NASA terminology while promoting greater interest and understanding of NASA's history and future. The 50th Anniversary Special Edition Add-on Deck will contain words not only used in space exploration, but also terminology from the past, current and future explorers, missions, and programs. "You've Been Sentenced!" delivers a unique way to understand these terms that is both fun and memorable for students.

"As part of our 50th anniversary celebration, this is an informal and fun venue to educate folks on American's space program, past and present," said Gregg Buckingham, chief, Education Programs and University Research Division at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "We will also learn more about the effectiveness of this kind of education tool from McNeill."

The purpose of this project is to build a strategic partnership among informal education providers, community groups, formal educators and families to promote literacy, particularly focusing in the areas of space, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The game "You've Been Sentenced!" can be used in classrooms to aid educators in teaching curriculum based upon space and space exploration at NASA.

According to McNeill, the NASA 50th Anniversary add-on deck will ship in October.

kyra

I believe it was in Michael Collins' "Carrying the Fire" that I first read of the concept of NASAese. The language of NASA goes beyond acronyms and accepted scientific and engineering terminolgy to actually have its own syntax and phraseology. I wonder if there is a writer's manual out there for NASA employees to write a memo. I believe there is its just a matter of finding it.

In future programs this accepted langauge will be the same just with new phrases and acronyms.